INSTITUTE FOR THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE AND SOCIAL SCIENCES
SCHOOL OF LANGUAGES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES
ASTON UNIVERSITY
Dear colleagues,
On March 7, at 16h30, in room MB750, the
Institute for the Study of Language and Social
Sciences will have the pleasure of welcoming
Patrick J. Duffley (Université Laval). Patrick will give a talk on
The needle in the haystack: what statistically
infrequent usage can reveal about linguistic constructions
This paper will defend the claim that in some
cases one can gain a deeper understanding of
linguistic constructions by looking at less
frequent uses than by looking at common ones. If
one only considers frequent uses, moreover, the
temptation is to propose a distributional
account, as in the construction grammar approach,
which uses frequency or measures of collocational
strength based on frequency in order to identify
constructions, and defines the components of a
construction in terms of the whole structure,
rather than defining the whole in terms of the
parts. This amounts however merely to a
reformulation of the distributional correlations
observed in the data and has nothing to offer in
the way of explaining why it is one form rather
than another which occurs in a given construction.
The talk will be based on Patrick's latest book,
The English Gerund-Participle: A Comparison with the Infinitive.
http://www.peterlang.com/Index.cfm?vLang=E&vSiteID=1&vSiteName=BookDetail%2Ecfm&VID=66399&
All are warmly welcome.
Ramesh Krishnamurthy
Lecturer in English Studies, School of Languages
and Social Sciences, Aston University, Birmingham B4 7ET, UK
[Room NX08, North Wing of Main Building] ; Tel:
+44 (0)121-204-3812 ; Fax: +44 (0)121-204-3766
http://www.aston.ac.uk/lss/staff/krishnamurthyr.jsp
Project Leader, ACORN (Aston Corpus Network): http://corpus.aston.ac.uk/
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